You Do This 134 Times Every Day At Work

In addition to checking email every six minutes and switching back and forth among thirty applications, we do this one thing 134 times every day at work without even thinking about it. This right-click maneuver is so routine, we really could do it in our sleep.

The Global software firm Pegasystems Inc. conducted a survey on productivity and figured out that we are doing hundreds of mindless little things every day in order to get our jobs done. One of those is the copy-and-paste function. We do that 134 times each day on average, whether it's a paragraph, a sentence, or one word that we want to move to the end of a page. We are constantly highlighting and right-clicking.

The survey also says we spend 13 percent of our time on email, and not all of it is helpful to our jobs. Surprise surprise. Only only 23 percent of the time we devote to email is spent on "value-generating work." The rest of the time we must be deleting junk and clearing out all of the "ok" and "ha" reply-alls.

How often do you check your work email? The average is 10 times per hour, or once every six minutes, throughout the course of the day, according to the survey. Aha. Those people that never seem to reply are getting the messages. They're sitting right there. We knew it.

Oh, and another interesting fact. If you're frustrated with typing mistakes and it seems like you're constantly having to hit the backspace button to fix the flubs, you're not alone. Pegasystems did the math and figured out that we commit 845 keying errors per day or once out of every 14 keystrokes. Each time I start typing I think surely this will be the time that I type perfectly and get all the way through without having to correct anything, but it doesn't turn out that way. I hit the backspace six times just typing that sentence.

Anyone ready to start writing with a pencil again? Now back to the copy-and-pasting...